Author Archive for Laurie

There’s something terribly wrong with the heavenly bed.

Published by Laurie on September 21, 2007 in Branding. 0 Comments

We just returned from delivering our daughter to a college in South Carolina and celebrating our son’s 16th birthday at TPC Sawgrass in Jacksonville. Tasked with booking hotels for the eight nights we were away I prescribed a nice balance of mid-priced hotels with a few affordable luxury nights to prevent the travel blahs. I was especially anticipating our return to a well-known hotel flag for its heavenly bed, a sleep experience that’s built on multiple layers of mattress, bedding and pillow bliss. At 11 p.m. on our first luxe night, I called to beg the night manager to strip our bed. An unheavenly odor permeated the sheets, making sleep impossible. The next day, we were moved to another room; regrettably, the not-so-sweet scent followed us across the hall. A self-professed cleanaholic with a sharp nose, I recognized the problem. It gets really warm inside a heavenly bed, with its thick duvet and many layers of upscale linens. The duvet traps perspiration. Follow that line and you begin to conclude that hotels can’t cost effectively launder a duvet on a daily basis as it does sheets and pillow linens.

The heavenly bed points to an important discipline for strategic marketers, brand managers and CEOs: calculating what can go wrong. It’s a marvelous thing to be a person of vision, even better to see the line to the finish. But after the first flush of a new vision passes, it’s time to start the homework—to count the costs, understand the risks, study the competitive environment, jog around the whole vision with a few experts to look for both opportunities and pitfalls, and then, most important, slow to walk a mile in the brand consumer’s shoes. What is the consumer experience? What will the consumer say is great about this new vision of product or service brilliance? What will diminish his experience or worse, cause his confidence in my company to falter?

Several weeks before our not-so-heavenly bed experience, I booked two more room nights at this same hotel for an end-October visit back to South Carolina. It really is a beautiful hotel, but now I’m torn: cancel the reservation or travel with a bottle of Febreeze.

Curiously enough, this particular “pea” in my sleep experience was hinted at as early as 1749. I found this on Wikipedia when I Googled “duvet”:

“In Westphalia, an English travel-writer observed with surprise in 1749,
“There is one thing very particular to them, that they do not cover themselves with bed-cloaths, but lay one feather-bed over, and another under. This is comfortable enough in winter, but how they can bear their feather-beds over them in summer, as is generally practised, I cannot conceive.” —Thomas Nugent, The Grand Tour 1749, vol II. p66 [1]

The speed of the gang

Published by Laurie on March 28, 2007 in Leadership. Closed

Are you guilty of reckless leadership? Personal leadership peaks when there is a balance of core disciplines—in my life, that adds up to a good diet, exercise, proper sleep, right relationships with family, fellowship with friends, personal white space and worship. The fulcrum is sensitive. Too much of this or that or looking around at how someone else is living or succeeding destroys zone or centered leadership.

If business success was as simple as getting our personal leadership act together, we’d all be running powerhouses. But the truth is, our businesses get reckless too. Why? Because you and I don’t always lead from our organizational core. We take our eyes off what our business uniquely is, where we’re uniquely going and the best, right tactics for getting there. We read too much, talk too much, gather too much intelligence on some other company’s DNA and lose our strategic center.

Successful companies find and leverage their core. They understand that the building blocks of strategic, directed, effective leadership are core essentials:

  • Core vision
  • Core values
  • Core politics
  • Core decisionmaking body
  • Core competencies
  • Core strengths → core opportunities
  • Core identity platform
  • Core constituencies (primary/secondary/tertiary targets)
  • Core messages
  • Core (unique) selling points
  • Core team
  • Core partners
  • Core collateral
  • Core-directed planning and execution

There are lots of reasons we quit leading from our core. We grow tired. Economic pressure, the principal assassin of core energy, increases. Competitive pressures rail. The team we count on changes or becomes ineffective, moving us from gatekeeper role to the trenches. A new genre of industry thinking causes us to rethink how we do business.

The truth is, if we lead companies we will remain in constant flux. People and processes and trajectories change. A lot about our company’s core, however, is fixed. And when we lead from that core and make decisions from that core, we create core differentiation in the marketplace we serve. Core differentiation—or core separation—wins the attention of our publics. Core differentiation is the principle ingredient for success.

When I was young and in a new leadership position that was likely over my head at the time, another agency principal said this to me: the speed of the gang is the speed of the lead. Those sharp words were an admonition to get my act together and lead from a controlled core.

How are you leading?

Great creative follows solid strategy

Published by Laurie on December 7, 2006 in Strategy. Closed

We struggled recently over the creative for a client. We had a “tail wagging the dog” scenario. The creative needed to push sales. That little tail needed to overcome what was missing in the way of consumer experience. It caused us to think about the ideal creative environment. Great creative happens on the fulcrum of strategic genius. Great brands emerge or are built on the knife edge of solid strategy.

We are immeasurably blessed to work with people who are geniuses within their industries. We serve clients who are stand-aparts in the world of banking, real estate development, the medical spa industry and hotel development. In the retail furniture segment, Jay is a significant threat to the national stores who play in our market because he has created a bleeding edge retail distribution model. On the platform of his industry knowledge, strategic thinking and commitment to excellence in infrastructure, creative gets to do what it’s supposed to do: create a tipping point. In the medical spa industry, Healing Waters has emerged once again as the #1 medical day spa in the industry. Why? Because the owner is powering her spas with a commitment to world-class talent—people who score “at talent” per the Talent Plus employee-scoring methodology (visit TalentPlus.com for the genius thinking that’s taken companies like Ritz Carlton to the highest level of performance). Truly superb talent has become Healing Waters’ unique brand story.

Sometimes genius within an industry is really just the cannon of confidence. You have to be different enough to get credit for it. When companies are gutsy enough to think strategically and employ resources to be well differentiated, they unleash brand power. And in today’s economy, brand power is the stuff that moves the sales needle—whether you’re a medical spa or builder or boutique hotel.

Sadly, there are companies—we’ve worked with some—who can’t quit playing it safe. They’re a lot more comfortable being all things to all people vs. something astonishingly great to a few target markets. Can you remember the last time you astonished a client or customer? Do you do it on a daily basis or occasionally by accident or never?

Creative is not a silver bullet. It’s not a magic elixir. It’s the next thing when you’ve done the right strategic things right, when you’ve edited your business to a fine point, when you’ve got a great brand and a compelling story to tell. No more tail wagging the dog. When you have a solid, strategic working platform creative becomes the lifeblood that pulses through your business and delivers your passion to the marketplace. And that dog will hunt.